That's your solution?' asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. 'Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?''Do you have a better idea?' She turned away.
She sounded like sex for its own heated sake, like death in a good cause, like clarity of purpose without the dragging, piled-up weight of a million dirty little compromises along the way…
Rumor ran in the slum streets of Trelayne like sewage in the gutters, mingled and colorful in its contents, but mostly shit.
Planetary colonization is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitize that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of wh...
Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict's fingers through the trees that line the street.
My gaze slipped out past the breakers. The ocean beyond was black and secret, merging seamlessly with the night a scant distance out from the shore. Even the massive bulk of the keeled-over Free Trade...
Make it personal.
Knowledge tossed away, she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. Willful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand. At
Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it...
I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she pee...
I imagine they're pretty much insane by now. Can't be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you're fighting tooth and nail for your life in a...
His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.
For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ours...
Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines. My own cross-sleevings had b...
Can’t fucking believe it’s come to this, it muttered. Negotiating with a fucking herdsman — you know, sometimes it’s — listen, I was the thief of once, you goat-shagging thug. You know that? The fuck...
Anyone who builds satellites we can’t shoot down needs to be taken seriously and, if they ever come back for their hardware, be approached with caution. That’s not religion, it’s common sense. Quellcr...
And for the moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as the breeze coming in off the sea.
A weapon—any weapon—is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man...
It’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
Who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long.